Last week I was at the annual meeting of the Australian Sociological Association (TASA), preceded by two pre-conference seminars – one for the sociology of youth, and one for cultural sociology. All up it was five very intense, well-organised days of hearing about and talking about sociological research. I think I must have listened to forty odd papers. I presented two of my own papers, too:

• ‘Friending Participants: Managing the researcher-participant relationship on social network sites’. The full version of this paper was published by Young recently, but it was good to talk through some of the central arguments I make here with my colleagues in the sociology of youth (many of whom have shaped my thinking here over the years).
• ‘Being Strategic and Taking Control: Bedrooms, Social Network Sites and the Narratives of Growing Up’. This is a paper I’m working on with my brilliant colleague Sian Lincoln. We’ve just submitted it for review.

I put together a rough storify from the conference, but I left it a bit late as the hashtag seems to cut off after a week. So, I did some cherry picking of tweets from before the conference dinner. I think it gives a general sense of some of the things that were covered at the main conference…